Health & Human Needs Committee - Regular Meeting

Good evening and welcome to the August 20th, 2026 Health and Human Needs Committee of the Dane County Board of Supervisors. Committee members, if you could please come off camera, if you're on Zoom, if you're able, and if somebody could signify whether they can hear me okay. Supervisor Glazer, can you hear me?

Yes.

Great, thank you. And Amanda, please call the roll.

Yes, sure.

Supervisor Glazer?

Glazer here.

Chair Weigleitner here. Supervisor Jackson.

Jackson here.

Supervisor Walsh is excused. Supervisor Hussleman is not present. Supervisor Obese.

Obese here.

Supervisor Dantzler Jr. Not present, but we do have quorum.

Thank you. We is in order and we will consider our minutes from the august 6 20 26 meeting is there a motion to approve the minutes so moved by supervisor jackson any discussion corrections seeing no hands um is there any objection to unanimous approval of the minutes Seeing no objection, minutes are approved. We have no fund transfers under item C. So we'll move on to our referrals of resolutions. Item D1, 2026, resolution 51, authorizing lease with Employment and Training Association of Dane County, Inc. for space at the Dane County Job Center. um i believe director schluter is with us uh virtually welcome director schluter um we have nobody uh in the room uh or registered to provide public comment tonight so unless a new person appears or we get uh otherwise new information i will not be calling for registrants because um there are none um so director shooter um do you want to give us some background on resolution 51

Yeah, yeah. And can you hear me okay?

Yes, thank you.

Perfect. All right. Resolution 51, authorizing lease with Employment and Training Association of Dane County for space at the Dane County Job Center. So this is a standard lease extension for an existing lessee at the job center and their longtime partner, the Employment and Training Association or EATA for short, E-A-T-A for short. The current agreement ends in June of 2026. They are leasing 13 cubicles, five offices, and three conference rooms. The total revenue is $34,000 annual that this brings in for us. Future years include a 2% escalator. So this resolution is a standard extension of the lease agreement that we have.

Thank you. And can you explain the substitute? It looks like I'm just kind of looking for some context here. Is this just updating? Do you have those notes?

I don't. Adam Charlton is on. Can you see those, Adam?

I don't have any other notes on this. What was the question regarding?

I was looking for a little background related to the substitute that is also included in the legislative item. It looks like the original version had 13 cubicles. This was reduced to nine in the substitute and I guess corresponding reductions in monthly rent based on the smaller size is that Is there any background information, I guess, to reducing the footprint there?

Yeah, I can provide a little context. So much, EDA, like most of the organizations that we contract and sublease out space to at the job center, almost all their funding is state or federal funding. They've had some program reductions for other things that they run there. So they've, and as they, like many other agencies, are trying to reduce their space needs and share space where it's possible. So they have reduced the space that they're asking for in this lease for those reasons. However, they have also let us know that it's likely that they may get another contract from the state or federal government in the future that may force them to then ask for more space. I would say most of the organizations in the job center, the space that they have kind of as these state and federal contracts kind of come and go and get increased or decreased. So we're frequently either amending these to increase the space or decrease the space based upon kind of where their contract statuses are at with different agencies that they work with.

Okay, thank you. And Adam, you work in the Division of Economic Assistance and Work Services. You're a manager in that division. I just want to give you a proper introduction. We have a lot of new committee members and it's been a while since we've seen you. So thanks for being here.

I'm just filling in for Sean today because she's going to make a little.

And Adam is the second in command. He's not giving himself enough credit. He runs the job center, doesn't miss a beat. when Sean out or on leave.

Got it. Great. Thank you. All right. Are there any questions for staff? Seeing none, is there a motion to recommend approval of the substitute for Res. 51? So moved. Moved by Supervisor Jackson. Is there any discussion on the motion? Seeing none, is there any objection to unanimous approval of recommending the sub? Seeing no objection, the substitute is recommended to the County Board. And we will move on to 2026, Resolution 94, accepting funds from Wisconsin Department of Health Services, DCDHS, and the Department of Human Services Disability and Aging Services Division. Director Schluter.

Excuse me, one quick second. Chair, I just want to let you know that it does appear that Supervisor Dantzler Jr. is on as an attendee. For some reason, I'm having a hard time getting him over to a panelist, but he is present. Just so you're aware.

Great. Supervisor Dantzler, it sounds like Amanda's trying to promote you. Do you need him to do something on

His end. I just resent the invitation as well as try to promote from within, but I don't know if it's a glitch on my system or why it's not promoting him over, but he is at least viewing.

It's okay. Yeah. I mean, we certainly want all our committee members to be able to fully participate in the meeting. So I don't know. Hopefully you'll be able to get on soon. Otherwise, perhaps maybe you want to try by phone and you can keep an eye out for a phone number or something. If I don't, if the app's not working to do that. Thank you for that information. Okay. So we are at resolution 94. Director Schluter.

Pollution 94 accepting funds from Wisconsin Department of Health Services in Disability and Aging Services Division. Dane County Department of Human Services Disability and Aging Division has been awarded funding from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services for the Area Agency on Aging, the AAA Nutrition Services Incentive Program. So this is the Nutrition Services Incentive Program. This funding is part of the federal farm bill passed from the state to the AAAs, the Area Agency on Aging, and provides reimbursement of food costs. Food costs include catering options for meals served to eligible congregate and home-delivered meals for participants who are age 60 and over. This funding is received annually. and is included in the 2026 budget. The additional funds of $85,000 make this funding contract a major contract and it totals $129,000. No budgetary changes required as a result of accepting these funds. So the total that we are bringing, the total of the contract now will be $129,000. in this resolution as $85,000.

Are there questions for staff? So I guess I'm wondering a bit about how this funding then is distributed. to the people that, to the entities that serve the food, provide the food? I see Division Administrator Angela Villescaz on camera now. Angela, you wanna address that question, please?

Sure. The Farm Bill provides supplemental funding to the congregate and home delivered meal funding of the Older American Act. It is to be provided to catering operations or the people who prepare the food or the meals for us as an incentive to buy local, not local foods, but domestic food. foods produced here in the United States. It is so it's in multiple of many of the catering contracts that we have that provide the meals to our meal sites and our home delivered meals.

So when we get additional funds, then is it sort of like, I guess, the allocation decision based on some type of formula? Or how does the department decide how to amend then those contracts?

It's already in their contracts. The funding typically comes in one lump sum annually. This year, and so you would normally see this resolution only one time with the full amount in it. The reason it wasn't done that way this year is because of the federal uncertainty. The state decided to allocate only a portion of it first. And then when they had final determinations from the feds about how much they were getting, they run it through, the funding gets distributed by the state based on the number of meals we provide in Dane County, which is second only to Milwaukee. And therefore we get a higher percentage of that money annually. So the money is already in their contracts for 2026. It's just that we had a lag in receiving the full amount.

Thank you. Did that affect? I mean, we're in August now. Did you think the leg affected the level of service? No, no. Okay.

It did not. Typically, what we do is in in fiscal services is any this this program depends on many different pots of money whether it's older american act whether it's levy whether it's the farm bill nsip money and typically what we do is we claim the federal dollars first the state dollars second the federal farm bill dollars third and then levy last so we're in we're in fine shape okay thank you any other questions from the committee

Seeing none, is there a motion to recommend approval of resolution 94? So moved. Moved by Supervisor Obese. Any discussion on the motion? Seeing none, is there any objection to unanimous approval? Seeing no objection, motion carries unanimously. On to 2026, resolution 101, allocating community development block grant housing phase one awards in the department's housing access and affordability division. And this is just an award resolution. No contracts at this point. Director Shooter.

Thank you. Resolution 101, as you said, at the CDBG Pro Housing Phase 1 award in our Housing Access and Affordability Division. This resolution affirms the Phase 1 spending plan from Dane County, $7 million of community development block grant pathways, which help remove obstacles to housing. And that's the pro housing allocation. $1 million was set aside to assisting county municipalities in Monona, Deerfield, and Waunakee with reducing barriers to housing through zoning and building code changes. $129,000 is being released under this resolution. And the municipalities in this phase were selected via the RFP process earlier in the year. A resolution authorizing the major contracts with Sun Prairie will be routed separately. Sun Prairie asked for $150,000 and was received. But I thank you. Chair Voigt-Leitner pointed out that Sun Prairie is part of the group of the awardees in this res.

Yes. I know that the, and I know there are people out of the office and I caught this at our check-in last week, but not prior to that, but I had asked that the applications be attached to the item. They are not. Is that, I guess I was wondering about that today.

Yes. Sorry. That was my mistake. I'm not following up. I did reach out to see about getting those applications attached to it, but I don't know the right verbiage, but because we're in the middle of the process, I couldn't attach it.

I'll see if I can find the answer. I see that housing manager of the CWG Home Division, Joanna Cervantes, is Off camera, what I don't know here is what these municipalities have said they're going to do. When we're approving, I know it's not CDBG usually, but I think we do have more information typically about awards, at least for housing development when we're considering whether to approve awards. And I know that CDBG and HOME make different awards as well. And there's information about what those programs are going to do. I believe in that process. So anyway, can you give us some background about the commitments, the plans that these municipalities have in terms of reducing barriers to affordable housing development?

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Hello, good afternoon. Thank you, Chair. My name is Joanna Cervantes. I'm the Human Services Manager here for our division. So there are three municipalities that are at your in the resolution today. So the first one I'm going to start off with is the city of Monona. And I'm going to take it one step back. So we did have staff out. We were trying to get permission on procurement to attach the applications. Because we're still in the middle of that process, we wanted to make sure that it was okay. And so that was the delay there. But I'm pulling up right now. on my end, the applications, and then I can speak to it. So if you give me just one. And I'll start with, I'll start.

Hi, Casey.

Casey Becker, Division Administrator of HAA.

Hi, everybody. Thanks for recognizing me, Chair. I just wanted to add a little bit of context while Joanna is looking up the specific details of the municipal applications. This resolution is a similar style to our affirming resolutions that we typically will send, just signaling to the county board what our intentions are. With the exception of Sun Prairie, these are contracts that would be below the $100,000 threshold, but we wanted to be transparent and keep the board updated as these funds were spent. And as we move through these different phases of the pro housing grant. So I just wanted to provide that additional logistical context for everybody in case folks are wondering why, why the resolution is before them today.

Thank you.

Right. So I can start with the city of Monona. It sounds like city of Monona is currently in the comprehensive plan and then the residential zoning codes. They're saying that it's not consistent with urban county, urban community focused on housing as a redevelopment strategy. So they're saying how Monona is describing it as being a landlocked community. They need additional funds to improve zoning and building codes that is going to help them. I'm paraphrasing some of their narrative.

Are you able to share screen, Joanna?

I'm reading from their application if it's okay with our director.

I guess I'm sorry. I don't know if I missed an email, but did purchasing say you could not share or was it just that they were waiting on confirmation that came through late or didn't come through?

I don't have the answer. If I could, I could not share the proposal. And so that's where I, that's, that's why I'm a little bit hesitant on the sharing aspect, but if it's, if it's okay, because we're in a public meeting to share it, I'm more than happy to.

Yeah, that's fine.

So I, let me try to share my screen here. Number two. So how the proposal, so this is the city of Winona. I started at the top. So we have contact information. There was a questionnaire. We asked what their goals were. Mueller specifically, there was a logic model that was attached to it. The part that I was paraphrasing was number three here that talks about the narrative aspect of it. And so then in the narrative, you know, they were talking about how they have a comprehensive plan, residential zoning code. They were talking about how an update on the comprehensive plan is already underway. And they know that it's going to be a key success for their implementation. Down below was where I was reading. Without these funds, it is highly likely that the necessary ordinance updates will be put off for at least one to two years, so they're justifying the need for it.

Sorry, I'm just kind of squinting to see this. I don't know.

Is it possible to make it a little bigger?

She would have to on her end.

Okay, thank you.

Are they using this then for LTE or consultant services or...

This is where I will pull up their budget. And so it looks like they have part consultant cost, which I believe that's the question that you're asking. Okay. So they listed column B as their consultant cost being $102,000. Dane County Pro Housing Grant being $51,000. They're applying City TIF to it, which is $48,000. City General Fund at $3,000. They have other funding that they're putting in together. with the total cost of $112,000. Okay.

That's helpful. Thank you.

It looks like at least that's the breakdown for Minona. I can share this if you want with the other municipalities as well. So in their detailed, so this is more, this is still Minona. This is a more detailed, they actually have it broken down by like what are the different tasks that are occurring. So Task 1 project coordination, zoning analysis, zoning ordinance, drafting the zoning map, directing the zoning code development, zoning code review, legal ordinance drafting. Community engagement is another big part of zoning changes. And so they do have that in there. So that one is Monona. Sun Prairie, I can provide the same. And so detailed budget. Again, different tasks. They're going to update their existing conditions, data, maps. They're going to update their goals, policies, objectives, alternative growth scenarios, city meetings, committee staffs. There's going to be public meeting, a lot of engagement there. It looks like it's happening in Sun Prairie. They're actually even identifying the need for translation interpretation services. So that's one thing that we saw that was unique to Sun Prairie. and then printing materials as it comes to the confine update. And then I can go now then to Deerfield. So again, as we go into those tasks, there is the issue identification barrier assessment. They're gonna detail public concerns with zoning code deficiencies. Task number two is going to be code analysis and evaluation. They're going to review the existing codes. Ordinance drafting. There is also that community engagement. And so one of the things that we talked with the municipalities is we have to engage our residents across that municipality. There's activities and then printing. And then I can follow the same then with Wannakee. I don't know. WannaKey was not, let me see. Sorry, let me go back here again. My apologies, let me go back to sharing. So when I go to detailed budget for WannaKey, we're seeing some of the same tasks. which goes back to data gathering, inventory, research and coordination, drafting the ordinance and staff reports, engineering review. They also have that community engagement surveys and then printing materials. And so that's where what you'll see then is column D under pro-housing project costs. That is, this is the segment that we're paying for.

Thank you. How many applications did you receive?

If I am not mistaken, I believe the total number of applications received were five, and there was one municipality that withdrew. So of the five, four continued down the process, and four received 100% of what they asked for.

I'm sorry, can you say that one more time?

A total of five municipalities. One municipality withdrew their application from the process. And so the four that moved forward in the process were allocated 100% of what they asked for, of what the request was. Okay.

So not like highly competitive, I guess. But they all met the kind of standards, it sounds like, that the county was looking for in putting out the application.

They did. So there was eligibility requirements. They all met the minimum eligibility requirements to be eligible for the funding. As we look at the scoring criteria, you know, the the biggest component for us was, can they get the work done in a timely manner between the category A and category B that was listed in the RFP? If they are able to accomplish those tasks, I think that was the biggest part is, is it a very big comprehensive plan rewrite or is it smaller activities? And so as long as they were able to meet that and meet the other eligible criteria, they were able to move forward there is going to be a balance of the $1 million that we had initially. I had budgeted for the space one so what we are anticipating is that when when this are people is completely over right so when the county board makes their final approval of this resolution we are staff is preparing right now releasing to second round of funding for the remainder of the $720,250. So, you know, part of our role has been working with other municipalities to get them aware and try to attract more municipalities to participate in the program.

And so, okay. Is there anything in the application that related to sort of political viability, leadership of the village board or the city in being able to move forward plan amendments? Because that will be an important implementation point, right?

Right. Good question, Chair. So the greatest feedback we've received right now from those municipalities that did not... So we went through a very large community engagement process. We went out to different municipalities to talk about this RFP. Prior to it being open, we held workshops, we held office hours. So we had a much larger number of municipalities that participated along the way. Feedback that we heard from those that did not submit an application the number one reason on why they did not submit an application was all due to timing either one they did not have the staff capacity at that time to engage in this um application and process quite yet for them they're waiting they were waiting a couple more months down the road um or and going back to timing too it was that um for some municipalities this is the first time in this field that they can get access to funding to help them with the rezoning, rewriting. And so for many of them, it was, they just were not prepared to submit an application at that time. And so what we are anticipating is that those that have shared with us that they didn't apply for phase one initially because of timing, we're hoping that they can come in in their round two and compete for funds.

But even in the, I guess my question also was getting at the municipalities that did apply that are being recommended for funding awards. We have, you know, some sense or have they represented anything about sort of support among policymakers? to move forward with the changes that are being drafted or will be drafted?

So the application did require that it would be signed by the municipality's place ranked officials. So in the city, it's near me, villages are the presidents and towns are your care. Okay. And so there had to, we try to make this application as simple as possible with a very minimal requirements that were needed to try to make it easy as easy as we can for the municipalities. Because of the requirement right to have it be signed by the municipalities, highest life ranked official there had to be more engagement in that process to be competitive, right? To be competitive with their peers. And so what we saw was that those that were ready were the ones that submitted and the ones that were still in the planning stages, those were the ones that had told us they weren't quite ready, but they were still interested for that round two or maybe even a round three. Because for them, it's all about timing. Okay.

Thank you. Any other questions from the committee? Supervisor Obizi.

Yes. Thank you so much. And thank you, Joanna, for what you have explained so far. So my question, as someone that is new to the committee itself, could you explain just from scratch, just a high-level overview of how these municipalities get to this point and how they were able to even apply. And then what is phase one, phase two, phase three. And then my other second question is, can we allow more time to have other municipalities participate or been able to compete?

Hey, Supervisor. I think I heard my audio was coming in a little bit choppy, so I think I heard the two questions. If I missed any parts, please let me know. So the first part that you wanted me to do is to give a quick overview of pretty much what is CDBG Pro Housing, right? How did we get to the $1 million of what we're currently at? And I believe that was your first part of the question. The second part of your question was a little bit more choppy, but I think I heard you say what was the process and could we extend that process to give them more time. Did I understand that part correctly.

Yes. Thank you.

Perfect. So CDBG for housing. So that's the pathways to removing obstacles. This was a nationwide competition that Dane County participated. It is not an automatic award of funds. So we competed nationally across multiple municipalities and counties and state entities for this one-time allocation at the time that is called CDBG Pro Housing. At the time, the maximum that you were allowed to apply for was $7 million, and that's exactly what we applied for. When we walked into this, we actually partnered with multiple municipalities. So the city of Sun Prairie, the city of Fitchburg, and at that time, it was the village of Mount Orem. Why we had partnered with those three specific municipalities was that CDBG Pro Housing required us to have Leverage, when we had applied initially under round one, we learned we were five points away from receiving an award. And our biggest fallout, at least with our initial application, was that we were missing leverage. So when we initially came in, we knew that for round two of the funding, we needed to bring in leverage. And so that's where we brought in the three different municipalities. I'll talk about that a little bit more in phase three. So when we drafted and in the engagement with the community, learning more about pro housing RFP would allow for funds and then going back to what was the need in our community. One thing we heard from many municipalities was access to funding was very limited as it related to zoning and building code changes. And so, and it was very evident in the RFP that HUD had released that they wanted us to focus a part of our project in that. It's not just the construction of the building, but they really wanted to get to the root of it. Meaning if we can reduce the zoning and building code barriers, that it would encourage developers to come into our community to build more affordable housing developments. And so we carved out $1 million that made up that phase one. And that would only applicants in that phase would be municipalities. Phase two was then focused on emerging developers. And so with the emerging developers, what we see in practice is that when it is, when you are a new developer in this arena, it is very difficult to get your way into larger scale projects. And so, and what we're noticing, at least on the CDBG and home side, which is the side that I administer here at Dane County is that we're getting less and less nonprofit developers at the table. And so phase two was drafted in a way that we allocated $2 million. That's how we have earmarked the $2 million to go towards emerging developers. And then phase three, we said, if we can change the zoning, we can work with the developers, then phase three is that construction part. And so it goes then towards the working with developers to build affordable housing units. And so how did we get to where we're at right now with phase one? So with phase one, Our team first started on grassroots outreach, going out to municipalities, having one-on-one discussions with village administrators, city administrators, staff, talking to them about pro-housing in general, and then being very specific about there's going to be a future application that you can apply to, and this is the goals of our project. of our project. And so we did a lot of those outreach. There was emails that were sent to all, I believe there's 59 municipalities, not including the city of Madison and Dane County. So we sent multiple emails to all municipalities, letting them know once we had the RFP workshops. We had workshops available that municipalities could participate. We also had one-on-one office hours with any municipality that chose to learn more about what CDBG Pro Housing was. As I mentioned before, we really took a deep, deep dive into our RFP to ensure we made it as simple as possible for the municipalities. So there was, in this RFP, I can confidently say there was many opportunities to be engaging with the municipalities. We were also surprised when we saw that number five come in, right, like five applications, because this team did a phenomenal job going out there and connecting with elected official, like, you know, the administrators, connecting with staff. And so because we saw a lot of that engagement prior, we really thought there was going to be applicant, many applicants. In fact, with our open gov system, we were actually even able to see that there was other municipalities that started applications, but never finished them. And so, um, in a RFP process, uh, we can only take those that did apply. And so it was five and then under staff review, uh, and then further discussion with one of the municipalities, they withdrew, uh, which then left us down to four. And so where we're at in the process is the application review team reviewed the proposals. It went to our CDBG commission. And then now it's in front of you as the health and human needs committee to review the affirmation of the awards. And then it's going to go through the Dane County board process.

Okay. Well, thank you so much. So, so this, so this money that we asked for from, the federal government is every year, right? We go back or no, it's just whenever it happens.

So this was a one time. So there's only been three rounds of funding. The first round, um, the first round we applied and we did not receive funding during the second round we did apply. And that's when we received the $7 million. There was around three this year. Um, We decided not to apply in this year, there was many conditions that were being said at that time that we just could not comply with. In that third round of funding, so we are only operating under round two so it's never it's not it's a one time funding once we use it we're done we're done with that Program.

So it is 7 million, so then 1 million was capped out for phase one, 2 million would be capped out for phase two, and then that would be left with 4 million, which would be for phase three, right?

We do have, the beauty of this application is that it did allow for some administration dollars, so it is what allows us to pay for our staff time. that is in the compliance of the funding. So we do have, so it's 1 million for phase one, 2 million for phase two. And then if I am not mistaken, I believe it is three, three. So basically the difference. It's 3.3. $3.3 million for phase three and then $700,000, which has been for administration.

So thank you. And one last question, I promise. How does this $7 million impact day-to-day people? I mean, I hear municipalities, I hear this, but at the end of the day, how does it actually get down to the grassroots?

Mm-hmm. So as we engaged in the Dane County Regional Housing Strategy, also known as RHS, one of the things that was evident was that the need for affordable housing units is very grand in our community. There is a need and there is an image that we actually used in our application in which it talks about the big space. where it shows that in the big squeeze, it looks like those that are under 30% AMI, and I'll try to find that image for you to see here, those under 30%, and then those at the higher rate, there's this competition for the affordable housing in the middle. And so why it's important that we invest the $7 million. We are making, and at least specifically to the zoning, It's not just a one-time impact. It's a long-term impact, right? If we make zoning changes that make it easier for developers to develop affordable housing projects in the communities, it allows for more units, which helps relieve some of the stress that is going on right now. Our occupancy rate is very small. And so when you have an occupancy rate that is so small and there's not enough units, affordable housing units, It becomes a big strain in the system. And so as we create more and more units, low to moderate income families are able to tap into those housing units. You don't see that as much right now with phase one, because like I said, phase one is more of those long-term you're going to end up seeing it more on like the phase three, when you start to see the construction of affordable housing units, that's where you'll see that direct impact because they're now then creating those houses, the houses, the apartments that people, affordable, low to moderate income people are going to move into. Unfortunately, you just don't see that with zoning as it's more planning, but there is a long-term impact to the residents that we serve here in Duncan.

All right. Thank you so much. Thank you, Chair.

And because we're our own CDBG kind of entitlement jurisdiction, City of Madison would not be eligible to apply for these funds. Is that accurate or is it different with CDBG Pro?

It was different. As an applicant under the CDBG for housing, we actually applied as a whole Dane County. So on a technicality, if the City of Madison did want to apply for these funds, they would be eligible. We are actually partnering with the City of Madison on that phase two as we talk about emerging developers. In fact, I was just in a meeting with their staff earlier today as we were planning out for that phase two. When we walked into this as a partnership in that initial application, Madison was at the table with us telling us that they would support us staffing-wise for the phase two because they see that need for the emerging developer. But on a technicality, yes, City of Madison could theoretically apply under the phase one for zoning changes.

Okay, thank you. Yes, I mean, I know they're pretty committed to... reviewing their um zoning and have certainly moved forward a number of changes to um and there's lots of affordable housing development in the city as well but i just wanted to confirm thank you for that um any other questions of staff or our cdbg commissioners i believe supervisor dansler and supervisor glazer may be on the cbg commission or um Not seeing any. Is there a motion to recommend approval of Resolution 94? I'm sorry, Resolution 101?

So moved.

Moved by Supervisor Obese. Any discussion on the motion?

I think that was Supervisor Densler.

Oh, sorry. Is that Supervisor Dantzler? Yeah. Supervisor Dantzler with the motion. Thank you. And I mean, I think one other point is that when those hopeful zoning improvements go into effect if they are successfully adopted by the municipality, the impact is beyond just what the county would fund for construction. The intended impact is to be so that other projects funded from other sources would also now be looking at development in those municipalities because they it's easier for them that that is available to them through it's not as onerous to get through the development planning process. So it does take time all of this though. So I appreciate all the hard work. And it's great that we have funding through the grant to administer this, this process. Any further discussion on the motion? Seeing none, is there any objection to unanimous approval of Resolution 101? Seeing no objection, it will be recorded as having passed unanimously. I would like, though, if it is... you know permissible and it certainly seems possible to have the applications and added to the legislative file um moving forward so just that is a that is a chair's request um yes for this if it's possible i know it sounds like you are still waiting on that um confirmation from purchasing or whatever but um Then I will go to item E1 items requiring committee action 2026 human services contract addendum. 004 for the food share employment and training services offset senior talent program. Director Schluter.

Thank you. This is Hiska 004 food share employment and training services for the Senior Talent Program. So this does not require any GPR. It's funded 50% by the vendor and 50% by a federal government pass-through that will be received by Dane County to the vendor. The program provides services for FSET that are tailored to seniors in the community as an alternative to other traditional FSET services. The recently enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act placed new requirements on older adults to meet work requirements in order to continue to receive food share. This new 50-50 FSET organization will help some of these food share members to come into compliance with the new federal requirement. So it's support and assistance so that these seniors aren't out trying to minimize the impact of some of the changes at the federal level. The addendum amount is for $48,000. Thank you.

Director Schluter, and I believe Adam Charlton is still with us. I'm just wondering if there's any more detail that we can get about this program, what they're going to do.

Yeah, I can add a little context as well. Thanks. So there's various 50-50 programs within our FSET structure. For example, there's Operation Fresh Start as a 50-50 because it serves a younger population that has different needs. There's Just Dane, which serves our reentry population because they have different needs. The sort of basic F-set contract and basic program serves about a thousand people. These are sort of smaller, more specialized programs that participate in this 50-50 structure in order to sort of help specialized areas that maybe just have a little bit different kind of need than the normal participants. FSET in general will provide different sorts of employment services and job search services and interview type services. But it's very hard for sort of the basic FSET staff and FS forward service workers there to cater to every single possible person and every single possible need. So we've developed a number of these 50-50 organizations to sort of help specialized populations that may have slightly different needs and slightly different barriers to being able to reenter employment and also to meet their requirements to stay and be able to continue to receive their food share services. The new program is gonna serve about 120 individuals, we believe. It's largely gonna be sort of a pick and choose for what they need, because even within the older population, there's gonna be different services than what they need. So there'll be ongoing workshops for those that need different, whether it be application services to just figure out how to do an online application, or how to simply take a resume and convert it into a PDF or something like that that might be those sort of technical skills that may be missing from this population. And all of the workshops are largely going to be geared to be face-to-face type of things, which is, again, the population need is more to have someone there that's hands-on that can help them with that sort of thing, as opposed to a lot of the other types of workshops which are done on Zoom and other medium that are a little bit more technical. I think the goal, and this also serves not just Dane County, but it does serve the entire Region 10 FSA area, although the majority of the people are obviously in Dane County being the biggest. Is that kind of what you were looking for, or do you have any other specific questions on the program?

I think that's helpful. Are there other questions?

All right.

Seeing none, is there a motion to recommend approval of HISCA IV? Or approve to finance? Move by Supervisor Jackson. Any discussion on the motion? Seeing none, is there any objection to unanimous approval? Seeing no objection, motion carries unanimously. All right. And then we're on to 2026. Act 87, this is the 2027 HHN Opioid Settlement Subcommittee recommendation to the Health and Human Needs Committee. And we have... Chair Joe Gailey here and Vice Chair Supervisor Collin Bruchuk. And we also have our new Opioid Settlement Coordinator, Felicia Benke-Shaw with us. So we're so glad to have you on board. And I know you have been working hard in your first weeks here with Dane County. So with that, I will turn it over to Chair Gailey and Vice Chair Bruchek.

Perfect. Thank you, supervisors. Good evening. We'll just run through our recommendations real quick. Shouldn't take us too long. They're pretty straightforward.

And they are attached to the agenda. Do you want Amanda to share? Okay. Technical difficulties over here.

One second here. There we go. Thank you. So our first recommendation is provide annualized funding to continue opioid settlement funded programs to 27 to avoid disruption of services. We'd hate for services to be disrupted of places that are already receiving funding. Want to take number two?

Sure. much of the discussion in the subcommittee was about the the need needs assessment that will be conducted by Phylicia thank you Sean we're very thankful for our work already on helping us understand what that might entail and what it might cost so this recommendation says support the continued progress

um and allocate up to ten thousand dollars for uh to complete the needs of the assessment and ensure that people who are unhoused and struggling with substance use are captured in the needs assessment and then next we have reduced funding from three fte to one fte positions for public health madison and dane county for staffing two of the madison dane county offices offering string service A while ago we had made a recommendation, and I think HN approved those three FTEs, and they're just kind of there, so we're recommending that we just cut it down to one.

Yeah, and that recommendation and this next one were suggestions by... Subcommittee member Ariel Smith from public health medicine in Dane County the savings from reducing from 3 after you to one after you should be reallocated to. Fund.

Certain services and program. And the last recommendation that we had for the committee is to defer any contracting and associated expenditures of the opioid settlement funds budgeted for a job in the center until the completion of the opioid needs assessment so maybe dictate how that goes. It's pretty much our recommendations pretty short and to the point.

Thank you. I mean, if it's okay with the committee, this is should be attached to your agenda as well. So you can pull it up on your own devices. Can you move off the shared screen because I want to ask some questions here. Oh, great. Um, I know, also serving on the subcommittee that a lot of time was spent on talking and about sort of the recommendation around the needs assessment and we had received a draft from one of our um subcommittee members um dr uh elizabeth um salisbury afshar and um felicia uh benki shah took took that and really kind of built it out into a plan that we looked at in our meeting. So I just want to give you time, Felicia, to just kind of introduce yourself, give a little background to the Health and Human Needs Committee, and share kind of high-level sort of summary of what your... proposed study will look like or needs assessment. And I would just also add, and I should have caught this probably at our check-in last week, but if you do, if you are interested in more of these details, definitely check out the minutes from the subcommittee because there are those attachments available in those subcommittee minutes that get into kind of the granular detail of this proposed needs assessment. So with that, Felicia.

Hi, everyone. Thank you, Chair. I'm Felicia Benke-Shaw. I'm about 90 days in officially to Dane County, so I'm super excited to be here. My past role, I was in Waukesha County where I spent the last nine years really working on strategy related to the opioid epidemic and how we can combat the opioid epidemic together as a community. I did take Dr. Elizabeth Afshar's book, A drafted needs assessment built it out into a year-long plan, including many lived and living experienced voices that will be highlighted through surveys, as well as focus groups with providers, community members, family members, and really looking at that system map as well. So my community needs assessment will be ran in tandem with public health overdose fatality review system analysis and system mapping as well. So we're hand in hand utilizing the community voices in OFR as well as the community voices in our focus groups and then working on data collection with many community partners including Wisconsin DHS. to really look at that data landscape of what is currently going on in our community. And then also, like it's highlighted in the recommendation, to really look at those that are unhoused as well and see what system gaps we have and those needs and how can we better support our community in those efforts. It is a 22-page draft proposal, so that's just the high-level summary of what we have planned so far.

Thank you. Are there other questions for Felicia or Joe or Colin? I would just, I guess, also note that I think we received we really wrestled with the question of whether to recommend kind of continuation funding of existing program because we haven't done a more comprehensive needs assessment and that was has been a concern that has been raised by community members and the subcommittee. But we did receive some information about from the various kind of contract managers and Felicia and Division Administrator Todd Campbell about kind of how those providers had been performing under their contracts. And also we had some come and speak to us as well. And we kind of wanted to just feel out like, does everyone still want the money? Do they still need the money? And are they meeting program requirements? expectations and we were we did feel confident at the time we made this recommendation that it was important to continue those services that you know with kind of the hope kits and the oak boxes and and the various kind of community DISBURSAL AND ENGAGEMENT AROUND THOSE HARM REDUCTION SERVICES WAS REALLY IMPORTANT TO KEEP GOING WHILE WE ENGAGE IN THIS YEAR-LONG NEEDS ASSESSMENT PROCESS, KNOWING THAT, YES, THEY WERE ALL DOING THAT WORK, YES, THEY WERE ALL PERFORMING AS EXPECTED, AND THAT THAT WOULD BE IMPORTANT TO KIND OF KEEP IN PLACE. NOW, THE STAFFING, I THINK, YOU KNOW, THIS COMMITTEE, WE HAVE IN OUR kind of stuck here is the re-referral of the three public health positions. So I think I probably would maybe put that on just to recommend amendment or denial, some change to that legislation because what we know from public health is that their volume has dropped given the change in practice as it relates to not providing safe smoking supplies anymore. And so it felt like You know, they still would be able to maintain two offices if they had one FT position that would help, but that it made more sense to then provide that funding out in the community where people are kind of. Feeling maybe more connected or safe or we might get a higher utilization pattern. So that's the kind of rationale with with that piece as well.

But and I do think it was.

It's kind of. Not easy to see the harm reduction center kind of put on hold necessarily either because we know how important it is, but I do think the committee, like these recommendations were unanimous. The committee really felt like this needs assessment would be really worthwhile, and anything that flows from it, including a harm reduction center, would be better informed by that process. So that is, that's, I feel... really grateful for the work. It's been a sort of bumpy year with the subcommittee, but we've had a lot of transitions. But I feel like I really appreciate the leadership of our chair and vice chair stepping up to fill a vacancy. We have one youth vacancy that will be filled hopefully soon. I'm still entertaining recommendations to fill that vacancy, but I have one good lead. But anyway, so thanks for that. Thanks for your hard work. The subcommittee met several times today. to to think through these things and and did definitely got some community input so um or i think we'll be we're definitely better situated with our capacity with the support of felicia and um and i look i hope that the um county board uh and this committee would support these recommendations This is posted under action items. It says requiring. We don't actually have to take action on this. We can just receive it. But also, I think it's noticed in the event a committee member wants to formally um move to you know accept the recommendations none of these are sort of self uh fulfilling they all will require additional um uh movement uh through the legislative through the budget process right so um that will come as we are getting right um into the budget uh next month. So I don't know what the will of the committee is in terms of the report, but we certainly appreciate the role of the committee leadership that's here. One benefit of making a more formal action in response to the report would be signaling to the department and the county executive how this committee feels, you know, kind of going into the budget process. So if, you know, it's, I'm not trying to discourage by any means a motion to accept the recommendations. And the only thing that I would tweak would be a slight modification to the fourth bullet to say Syringe Services Programming. and harm reduction services or something to that effect, because in the event the situation as it relates to safe smoking changed or an organization felt more supported in that, I wouldn't want to unnecessarily restrict that type of service. i'm wondering how the chairs feel about that potential i think that fits with the intention of the subcommittee okay um i guess it's i'll ask for if someone wants to make a motion um to accept the report um with one minor uh amendment to add and related harm reduction services after programming in the fourth bullet move approval as recommended with my addition yes please okay All right, there's a motion. Any discussion on the motion by Supervisor Glazer? Thank you, Supervisor Glazer.

So the fourth bullet, where, so I'm adding, add and related harm reduction services to where? After the word programming. Oh, she's right there. So, and funded FTE assistance just for in-service programming and related harm reduction services? Yeah.

Thank you.

Okay. Is there any further discussion on the motion? Seeing none, is there any objection to unanimous approval of the motion? Seeing no objection, the recommendations are accepted. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Supervisors. Have a good rest of the afternoon.

Thank you. All right. We have three more presentations and a report. So we will go to our Dane County Housing Authority DCHA annual update. And I see the director, Karen Connect, with us. Thank you so much for joining us, Karen. Thank you, Chair.

It's nice to be here again. My presentation is updated from the one I gave last year. So if you were here on this committee last year, it might look a little bit familiar. I didn't start from scratch. So I've updated some numbers and And would, oh, OK, great. I was going to ask if I needed to share my screen, but there it is. So thank you. So this is our annual update. I've got an agenda on the next slide just kind of going over. I'll talk a little bit about our history if you're not familiar with us, our current staffing, a little overview of our revenue sources, and then an overview of the programming that we're working on. history on our next slide. We were created by the Dane County Board in 1972, so we've been around over 50 years. We're a quasi-governmental agency and we really function a lot more like a small nonprofit. than a larger unit of government we go out and we have a finance director a full-time finance director we use a fee accountant to supplement that with some of the expertise in working with our hud programs we don't have hr in staff there's a firm that we use for some hr support Likewise, we use DaneNet for some IT support. They specialize in working with nonprofits here in Dane County. So some of their proceeds go into providing free computers and things like that. So they're very aligned with our mission. But marketing, legal, everything is really purchased online. Separately, the county doesn't provide those services for us. So we are functioning a lot more day-to-day like a small nonprofit, but with heavy regulations as most of our funding is from the federal government running HUD programs. So kind of a different combination, lots of regs, but yet working like a smaller nonprofit. Our current staffing is 10 people, including me here at the The next slide kind of goes through the number of positions. There's me, the executive director. As I mentioned, we have a full-time finance director, an admin assistant, and then most of our direct staff work with our housing choice voucher program. We've got a coordinator, someone who works on eligibility and housing specialist duties, two more housing specialists that support people who have Section 8 vouchers that helps pay their rent. We have a new position, a housing choice voucher generalist who's going to be doing some housing specialist work and also some inspection work. because all units need to pass inspection before one of our participants can move into them and we do inspections for existing participants too. We have a requirement to be out there at least every two years looking at those apartments and making sure that they're well maintained. So we've got a new person who's been with us about a month who is a licensed electrician in Illinois and is splitting his time between the inspection and housing specialist functions and gives us a little more flexibility. We do have a housing inspector who's nearly full-time and then we have a self-sufficiency coordinator. A family self-sufficiency is another HUD program and that person also supports voucher holders at the Madison CDA. We have a joint program with them that we've had for probably about 15 years. Our property management is hired out to a third party property management company. So we don't have direct staff managing the property that we own. The next slide is a summary of our revenue from 2025. We're just finishing up our audit for 2025. Hopefully, we'll get that submitted to HUD in the next few business days, I'm hoping. Next week, we can get that off to HUD. That would be a great, it's always a great relief to see that get submitted. But our revenue last year was only almost $20.4 million. Kind of looking at the summary here, 15.6 million of that comes from HUD and the lion's share of that 14.8 million is our voucher program. We support, you know, 1,200, 1,300 families kind of depending on where we're at with that funding every month, helping them pay their rent. We have a small project-based Section 8 property for the seniors located in Cross Plains. We have public housing situated in four different communities around the county, Sun Prairie, Monona, Mazomanie, and Stoughton. And then you can see we have a separate grant for the family self-sufficiency. That was a little bit low last year. We had some turnover in the position and it took a little while for us to hire a new person. So we had some vacancy in that position. That's not a full year of funding. But that's just an overview of where our revenue is coming from. Looking at the vouchers a little more closely, I took July 2026 and kind of broke down the vouchers that we have out there that are utilized. And we have kind of I'll call regular vouchers, which are our regular housing choice vouchers that are not part of a special purpose program. And that includes our emergency housing vouchers that says EHV. And that's a program that came up during the pandemic to house people who were homeless or we had a program that was ending a permanent supportive housing program that was ending and the Our local COC prioritized making sure those people stayed housed. So some of those people were some of the population we served with the EHV vouchers, but they came out from HUD during the pandemic. Initially, we were told that they would be funded through 2030, and then we found out last year last year in spring that the funding wouldn't go beyond the end of 2026 so HUD really encouraged housing authorities to try to find other resources and move them to another part of their voucher program so we did that and we moved our people who remained on that program with those emergency housing vouchers to the regular increment so they will continue to be continues to be assisted. So when you see EHV, that's a program that will not be continuing in the long run. We have family unification vouchers, a total of 50 of those, 44 of those are currently in use. Those are two different types of vouchers within that category. I have a little more explanation of that coming up, so I won't mess up my presentation on that next slide. I'll leave that We have five VASH vouchers that increased to 10 on August 1st, we have to have the support of the VA to be able to apply for more vouchers from HUD. And they were supportive of us increasing our total by five. So we now have 10 of those. And mainstream vouchers, we have 104 leased, but we have 153 of those altogether. So we're still actively leasing those. Again, we've got our regular vouchers on the next slide. We have project-based, 163 of those vouchers in 21 different developments around the county. And those vary quite a bit. Some of them target people that are coming out of homelessness from the COC. Some of them are targeted towards seniors or people with disabilities. But we do have... 21 different developers with project-based developments with project-based vouchers in them. So quite a few for an agency our size. And the way the voucher program works is you may have a certain number of vouchers from HUD, but really you can fund as much as far as your money will go. It doesn't mean Each voucher really carries its own funding. You have a pool of money and based on where rents are in your community and how much subsidy each household needs, their rent is tied to 30% of their adjusted income and the rest of it is filled with that subsidy from the government. So, the amount of vouchers you can actually issue and have active in the community depends on the pool of money that you get from HUD and how far each of those will reach based on how much subsidy each voucher household is using. So, it's kind of a... It's a little bit of a moving target sometimes to try to use up all your money, but not use too much and go into a shortfall situation with HUD. So it's kind of a fine line to keep your leasing up and use all the money and not have to send it back to HUD or have another community be able to use it, but yet not go over that amount and run short. So the main pool... Our regular vouchers are combined with the VASH vouchers and the FUP vouchers and the former EHVs. They're all in one big funding pool. The next slide goes into a little more detail on the family unification vouchers. And these are referred to us by Dane County and they can be used for families who are living apart and could be reunited if they had a stable place to live. So we have mostly families in those 44 vouchers that we have utilized. We do have some young people coming out of foster care. And for a long time, we really did not have a lot of youth in this program. But I would say we probably have out of those 44, maybe six or seven right now. So we do have more youth than we've typically served in this program. And we probably have had these vouchers for about 15 years as well. Again, the next slide highlights our VASH vouchers. We have recently increased to 10. Everyone with a VASH voucher also has support, social service support from the VA as part of that. That's a requirement of the program. We're actually... If you could advance one slide. Thank you. Thank you. So... The VASH again has the social service component that comes with it from the VA. The next type of special purpose voucher we have are the mainstream vouchers. And again, we have 153 of those. Those are targeted toward adults with a disability who are not elderly, aged 18 to 61. And so we are still leasing. We ran out. This is still in a separate funding pool. And we had used all the money we had really allocated. So we had to stop leasing these last year. And we are able to keep leasing again this year. So we have been pulling some people from our waiting list. and are actively trying to lease the mainstream vouchers again. This population, again, is a challenging population to keep housed. So we do have some attrition in the vouchers as well. So we need to work to try to get our number up. HUD wants us to be at least 82% utilization for each special purpose voucher that we got. So we do have some capacity to lease some more of our mainstream vouchers. And then the next slide covers a little bit about our self-sufficiency program. Again, we are the lead agency in this HUD grant, which we share with the Madison CDA. It is a voluntary program for our voucher holders, but it is designed to help with some goal setting to find more of a career path, educational path for people who are on our voucher program and are able to increase their earning power and their self-sufficiency. So normally, if you are earning more, your share of your rent goes up. And it can feel like you're taking two steps forward and one step back. But with this program, even though your rent is going up, you get a matching contribution made to a savings account. And so each month that you're earning more than you were when you signed up and joined this part of the program, you know, we have had people graduate from this and it's a five-year term. And if you're still working on some goals, we can even extend that to seven years, but we've had people, Several people graduate with $10,000, $15,000, even a little bit more than that in a recent graduation. So it can result in a nice sum of money by the time that we're finished. We also have a local program committee made up of community agencies, Madison College, the United Way, the Urban League. We have representatives from FSET, a number of different agencies supporting. So that committee meets about every two months, and we're able to reach out to see what programs might be out there to assist people in the goals that they've set or the things that they're working on to try to enhance their earning power and their career prospects. We also own some real estate. We have about, I would say, about 250 units altogether. And as you can see from the chart, quite a different breakdown of different programs. We have the 86 units of public housing. We have the little 16-unit Section 8 property. property with tax credits and rural development financing and subsidy that's located in three different communities, DeForest, Stoughton, and Verona. We have two older tax credit developments that we got into later on. We didn't develop them. We weren't in it when the tax credits were actually flowing. We have a senior property in Belleville and a 16-unit historic rehab in Mazomanie. And then we have some market rate housing. And we are considering disposition of some of those units to be able to focus more heavily on things that are really at the heart of our mission. And we have sold one market rate property recently. We have 10 units that are leased from Dane County on Packers Avenue. And we own a group home on the west side of Madison that is leased to Sarah's Helping Hands. So the next slide gives a little more detail on our public housing. We've been working to improve the physical condition of this housing, and Dane County has provided us funds to assist with that. We've spent about $1.3 million of the $2.5 million that, and this has made a huge difference in improving the quality of the housing stock. And I'm sad to comment on the next bullet point, but We have recently fallen back into troubled status with HUD based on our 2024 calendar review for the public housing. A big component of that was poor scores on a physical inspection back in August of 2024. and part of that was a switch to a new standard of inspection, an INSPIRE standard versus A REAC protocol that HUD had used before and the property management company that we work with really wasn't very familiar with the new INSPIRE standard and that didn't help us too much in that inspection. HUD, based on the score we got, was... based on their guidelines, should have come back and re-inspected us in 2025. They have not done that. They have not come back in 26 either. And so that score from 2024 will stand in our 2025 evaluation and will at this point probably stand for 2026 as well if they don't come back and re-inspect. And that is 40% of our score. So we also HUD raised the bar on the scores for occupancy. Their target now is over 98% occupancy. We had an average of 97 point something for 2024, so we lost some points with that. There's another component of their scoring that measures occupancy only on the last day of the year. We had some households move out during December of 2024 that took us below the target for that date of 12-31. We lost five points there. So just a number of things that, and we're in troubled status by one point. We have a current score of 59 and 60 is passing. So it's a one point difference. I have been talking with a consultant and have shared some information with him who used to work at HUD to see if he thinks there's any grounds for an appeal on any of the any of the points and I've reached out to him again today and he will let me know by tomorrow if there is any grounds for an appeal, but I have not found any yet. So I fear we will be back in troubled status with more HUD reporting coming. The last slide is again a summary of our collaboration with Dane County. And we have a strong lending partnership working with Casey and her team We have, as of the end of last year, I tallied up and we have worked on 34 loans through the Affordable Housing Development Fund. Most of these are gap financing in new affordable housing development that's been created around the county. We have Fair Chance Housing Fund, one loan in that pool, which is designed to work with returning citizens who've been involved in the criminal justice world. And we are also doing some land banking with Habitat for Humanity Dane County and the Madison Area Community Land Trust. Neither one of these has funded yet, but Habitat has reached out within the past week. And so I am working with Jenna Wutherich and legal counsel from Dane County is looking a little bit of that too, because I think we're getting close to funding for something for Habitat under that part of the lending program. So that is the last slide of my presentation. And if anyone has any questions on what we're doing at the Housing Authority or anything I've covered in the presentation, please let me know.

you karen supervisor jackson yeah i have some questions um what are we doing to help um folks who have vouchers but can't find landlords to accept them well you know we have had some in the past hud had provided some funds for especially some of the especially some of the um

special purpose vouchers. Those emergency housing vouchers carried some special administrative funds to help with leasing and then we had some funds for the mainstream vouchers. We had $76,000 in special admin fees for the mainstream vouchers and a smaller amount for the family unification vouchers. But we are almost out of the money. They took back any money that was left over from the emergency housing vouchers. We had to send that back to HUD because that reached an expiration date. But we're considering setting aside some additional funds for maybe some security deposit help, which is one of the things that we had used those special admin fees for with the leasing of the emergency housing vouchers and the the mainstream vouchers. So we're considering taking some resources and creating another pool of money to help with security deposits and some application fees because that did make a difference. So especially now that we're pulling off the waiting list and leasing again.

Okay. And how long is the waiting list and what are you doing to reduce it?

Well, the waiting list really depends on how much money we have from HUD. And it really, really hinges on that because we did go into shortfall two years ago. And we spent more money than we were allocated, and we got over $700,000 of additional HAP funding from HUD to make sure we could fund everyone that we had issued vouchers to and we were serving, and we didn't have to remove anyone from the program because there is a provision to... on removing people if you're spending too much. And so we really were grateful that we were able to get funded and didn't have to take any of those steps. So we have pulled probably close to 200 people from the waiting list this year. The last time we opened our Section 8 waiting list was three years ago. And then we started to get to the point where we were squeezed on funding and squeezed on funding. being over budget. And we had to take some steps to stop issuing and really watch what our payment standard is. But we've had a boost in inflation. And it always depends on how much of an inflation boost you get from HUD as well. So we have had an inflation boost for this year, which has given us a little more money. So we have pulled close to 200 people off the waiting list. And even in the three years since we opened it, you know, there's a pretty high number of people that are coming back, return to sender, non-deliverable. But we are, you know, we're going to continue to make sure that we're trying to use the money that we have allocated to us. But we're actively pulling right now. Okay. Thank you so much.

Yeah, and just a couple points of legal information. Source of income and receipt of rent assistance in Section 8 is a protected class in Dane County. So if a landlord or property manager says something like, we don't take Section 8, that is illegal and should be reported to the Dane County Corporation Council for investigation. Okay. That doesn't mean just because you have a voucher you're guaranteed to be approved for housing because there are other legal reasons why you may be denied. But because you receive Section 8 is not one of those legal reasons. And also, as Karen pointed out, it's really important when folks are on waiting lists for subsidized housing programs like Section 8 or public housing or other site-based HUD programs to make sure you keep track of that and update your address when you move and your contact information. So when your name comes up, they know where to send that correspondence. I have a couple questions, Karen. You mentioned the selling of some of your properties, and I know I got a recent contact from a constituent who is in the work of affordable housing creation and preservation and has applied for some county funds in the past and was really interested in trying to acquire properties that the DCHA was putting out on the market with the interest of you know, creating or preserving affordable housing. So I am wondering if DCHA when looking at, you know, possibly disposing of properties would be open to putting out a sort of priority, preference, or some sort of commitment to developers that would be doing affordable housing that, you know, that would purchase the property for affordable housing consistent with the DCHA's mission or particularly, especially if, if, if it's, you know, it had been affordable housing, but, or, and, or potentially partnering with, with our Dane County Housing Division in a way that does that, I guess, potentially through the, obviously you're like our lending partner, but, and I know you got a lot going on, but I just wanted to see, because I haven't had the chance to really follow up on that constituent concern.

Well, you know, part of it is, You know, we own six, well we own five now, but six market rate properties and we haven't taken one dime of any cash flow from those properties. And I've been here almost six and a half years and we haven't had one dime come back to help support the agency or its operations. Those properties have had a significant amount of deferred maintenance. And so anything that they have generated, I have left in the properties to try to keep improving them and addressing that deferred maintenance because I want people who are living in our housing to be living somewhere safe and have it be good housing. And it is a constant, I need a roof here. My parking lot is deteriorating here and there are giant potholes. This property needs windows. This needs that. And the properties, because they are market rate, don't qualify for any of the traditional affordable housing funding sources. So you're hoping that enough of it cash flows that it can generate. And I've refinanced them all and pulled as much cash out as I could to try to cover that deferred maintenance. keep them moving forward in quality. But when my predecessor purchased all these, there was really no plan or no thought on how to improve them or do capital improvements or do work on them. So I inherited some properties with a lot of backlog. And I've been scrambling for quite a while to try to keep them in good condition and not have it be a detriment to our reputation and, you know, the people that are living in our housing. And they're also all going to be, they all need to be refinanced again next year. And kind of looking at how much interest rates have increased too, because we have some that are still under 4% interest right now. We refinanced the two tax credit properties. Those loans both matured in December and January. And kind of looking at the whole thing, if we kept everything, it would be over another $100,000 in debt service every year that the cash flow of those properties won't be able to cover. So... you know, for us to be scrambling, spending all our time scrambling on trying to handle capital improvements and cover debt service on market rate properties and not have the bandwidth to address some of the things that we need to address with HUD, you know, we've got to We've got to address some of the things with HUD and the public housing and our scoring with that. And when I'm stretched so thin trying to figure out how to put a roof on an eight unit in Sun Prairie and, you know, it just, it takes away from being able to address some of those other issues too. Yeah.

I understand why you need to maybe downsize a little from that stock or all of it or whatever. But I guess my question is, are you open to doing that in a way that would give priority or preference to making that market rate housing affordable housing by way of an affordable housing, I guess,

I think some of it depends on how long that would take to, I mean, if someone's talking about, I want to apply for tax credits in the next round and, you know, you're looking then at probably, you know, you're out a year and then to get that closed, you might be out a year and a half and, It depends a little bit on, because in the meantime, I still have to figure out how to address critical issues, how to refinance it, how to cover the debt until that happens. And so I think some of it depends on timeline and how we manage all of that.

Okay, thanks. I will maybe follow up offline separately and with Division Administrator Becker as well. Supervisor Dantzler.

Yes, thank you. Karen, you mentioned something very interesting to me that caught my attention when you said it. So you said your predecessor didn't have a plan for a lot of these maintenance and things like that, and this left you scrambling. I guess I'm curious to understand, how does something like that even happen, building You know, these types of things with no plans to keep it nice and neat for the individuals that are living there. And then also, would you say that that's something that you see a trend happening in these types of housing? And if that is the case, what can electeds or other folks do to kind of work with individuals so you're not seeing this happen so much because I mean, you don't want to, just because somebody is housing insecure, you don't want to just put them anywhere and just be like, well, you just be happy you have a roof over your head. Like, I don't think that that's the direction we want to go in. So I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on that.

Well, we haven't bought anything since I've been here. So this is all housing that was acquired prior to my being here. But, you know, there... I don't think there was really much of a plan on how to pay for the agency. My predecessor looked for financing that would cover as much of the purchase price as possible and didn't really have that structure. So I can't speak to... what happened before I got here and what the rationale of, you know, the board was during that time or, you know, all I can do was play the hand that I was dealt. But we've put, you know, we've put quite a bit into, we've looked for grants for, you know, some of this and, you know, And I have refinanced everything I could and pulled cash out to keep putting money in. So, you know, we've brought the quality of the housing up, but some of it is still still needs more, still needs more work, can always use more work. You know, we've got a couple of properties that are built around that. 1970 that are part of this mix. So there's some properties that are a little bit older. They're certainly habitable and they're certainly, they're nothing fancy, but there's a continued amount of capital needs that are coming on that. And I don't know that our housing authority is the best group to be scrambling to try to keep that up.

Got understood. Thank you.

Yeah. I don't know if I, I don't know if I really answered your question.

I mean, for the most part, yes. I like that answer works. Like anything else I can, I don't need to take up too much time here. It could be more of a follow-up conversation later on.

Okay. Supervisor Obisi.

Yes, thank you so much for this great understanding. So legally, is there any responsibility that Dane County has in terms of making sure that this properties are in a good shape? I mean, Dane County has a government basically. or or is there. I was in authority different efforts only separate from Dane County responsible.

I do not believe I mean and and chair weigle itiner if you if you think differently. Let me know as as you your more well versed in the law than I am but I but I don't think the county has any liability for our housing stock.

Yeah, I mean, I would say that in terms of legal responsibility, DCHA is a separate legal entity. There is some kind of commitments in terms of supporting the DCHA in our ordinance, but I don't think it extends to actually, you know, maintaining DCHA's properties, literally. Yeah. whether we have a moral responsibility to our constituents, to the people of Dane County to provide safe and affordable housing. I think, you know, we may answer that question differently. And, I mean, there's a lot of housing work that our division does. is doing and obviously in partnership with the DCHA being our lender. So like, and that's why, you know, I was asking some questions about their different properties because there are certain funding streams we have as well for acquiring properties and rehabbing properties that some community partners might be interested in, right? We've approved some of those contracts recently, but it is absolutely true that the federal government has not adequately funded the federal housing programs like public housing to appropriately maintain and improve those properties. um and you know karen talked about the the market rate ones that are just kind of part of their portfolio because of history i i will say um in in response to some of the contacts around the acquisition of those properties um my understanding is that karen's predecessor there like there was some problems with kind of having voucher hold, having vouchers expire, having vouchers that weren't, like people were not, were having trouble leasing up. And so there was some thought that if, you know, there was a separate Dane County Development Group that could provide more housing opportunities for voucher holders to be able to lease up, that that would increase voucher utilization, which would in turn increase funding to the housing authority for HUD on those vouchers. I believe that was some of the vague intent and background related to that, but how that actually was implemented obviously has contributed to this situation that we're in. Did you have other questions, Supervisor Obese?

Yeah, just one more question. And thank you, Chair, for your kind explanation on those. My other question is, so I might have missed this presentation, but do we have an idea of what, how much the wait list we have currently in any of those voucher programs. And then also, are there situations where we have to send money back to HUD? And if there is, why are we not, are we, is there any sort of Is there any sort of way reaching out to folks that are on-house to let them know there's opportunities as well for those vouchers?

What about the opportunity for the vouchers? I missed a part of your question.

Oh, no, no, absolutely. So, I mean, one is, are we giving money back to HUD for unused funds? And if so... why are we making enough efforts reaching out to those on-house community members to let them know about those vouchers so that way money never goes back to the heart.

Yeah, that's the goal is money never goes back to HUD. But, you know, if we got a big inflation adjuster this year, so more than we were expecting. And so we – and sometimes you don't get – information from HUD, like January 1st, sometimes you don't quite know exactly how much you're getting because it takes a while for that federal budget to get passed and for you to know exactly where you're standing. So in a perfect world, we would use every dollar every year of the voucher money. Now, The year we went into shortfall and got over $700,000 of money to cover what we were spending and what we had in the pipeline with people having vouchers and leasing and shopping and leasing up. That money came from other housing authorities to make us whole. There's a little reserve HUD has, but they take stuff from other housing authorities if someone's over. So there have been some years too where HUD has taken some money from us and given it to other housing authorities that were in shortfall when we had a little extra. So we try to get to the point where we're not giving any money back. But like the year where we got over $700,000, there have been years where HUD has taken a little bit of money. But we are actively pulling. Again, we pulled about 200 people. We pulled 200 households. We pulled off the waiting list recently. We probably have about 1,000 names left on our main voucher waiting list. When we opened three years ago, we did a lottery for the first time with that waiting list. And we took 1,500 households off that list. Because if the list gets too old, it gets more stale. And then we do have more people who aren't at the address and haven't kept us up to date on that and who we can't find. So we had pulled probably about 300 names in the past couple of years off that list, working largely on leasing up those mainstream vouchers because we were actively leasing those. when we were kind of tight on money in the main pool. We still had some room there. So we kept pulling for that, but then we had to stop pulling on that last year because there was so much uncertainty about whether we had enough money to keep going on that front. And then this year we've started pulling off the main list again because it is now clear that we've got enough funding to support some more leasing. So, we're probably down to about 1,000 out of the 1,500 that were on that list last year. So, we've got to work through those people before we... open it to new people. So we still have quite a few left. And we do from time to time do a purge of the waiting list, which is where we would send out a mailing to everyone on that list to say, do you still wanna be on the list? Let us know. And then that will kind of show to who is no longer reachable and no longer at the address that we had on record. We haven't purged the main list, When we're going and offering people housing and pulling people off the list it's it's a little bit like a purge to because we do get returned to sender if they're not if they're not at the address, we have for them.

Alright, thank you.

hot is also providing us a lot less support on on. Kind of tracking this program and tracking our funding. We used to meet with them every month from a HUD Milwaukee office. And they would prepare this tool, this big spreadsheet that they've got with a lot of macros and inputs on how many are you pulling a month and what's your success rate for leasing and how much attrition do you have. And HUD would prepare that and we would talk about it every month and they would give us advice and they'd say, full speed ahead, you need to pull more, you need to lease more or whoa, whoa, whoa, you're spending too much, slow down, slow down, you don't issue anymore, you need to do this or you need to do that. And that's no longer possible. There's no longer any feedback in the current administration. That's not a thing. And we now run that tool by ourselves and HUD will not give us any guidance or advice on our lease up or where we should be or what we should be doing. It is 180 degrees from what it used to be.

And do you know for the maintenance, how much dollar are we talking about for those market rates buildings? Is there a dollar amount?

You know, we haven't had a capital needs done on these, so I don't have a ready dollar amount there for you. I mean, I would be speculating. but they still need some more work. Thank you.

Karen, I do have other questions. Supervisor Jackson. I'm sorry, Karen.

I do have one question. Just in your opinion, what do you think the greatest challenge is for the Section 8 participants right now in our county?

Well, I mean, I think there's a little more – the market's not quite as tight as it was a year or two. I think some of the new development that's come in and the increased number of units, I think there's a little – I think there's – I think the vacancy rate is not quite as low as it was a couple years ago. I think there's a little more – And we've seen higher vacancy in the market rate properties that we own. We've seen a little higher vacancy in those as well. Some of those older properties. So I think there's a little more room if you have credit challenges and... If you have credit and criminal challenges, it can still be a hard thing. Even though voucher holders are a protected class in Dane County, it can still be challenging to find a place if you've got credit and criminal issues. There's not as much money out there for security deposits. I was talking about maybe using some of our resources to help with some of that. There's not as much money out there for security deposit help as there has been sometimes in the past. and there's not as much money. If you have fallen behind in your rent and you are past due, there's not as much money out there to apply for to kind of make you whole or give you a fresh start or come in with that. You know, we have a lot of people who are finding places, who are leasing up, but if you have bad credit or criminal, it can still be challenging to find a place, and maybe you're not, you know, ending up with the best landlord in some of those cases, but There are still a fair amount of our participants who have some barriers to finding a place.

Thank you. I appreciate you.

Okay, just a quick follow-up on that one. How is housing cost a factor? Do you think that your payment standards are high enough to be able to provide the sort of choice that's intended for the Housing Choice Voucher Program? Well, we've raised them twice this year.

We raised them in January, and then... We raised, City of Madison raised theirs as of July 1st and we followed suit in August 1st. And we were, it was clear that we had enough money to do that because again, we didn't want to end up back in shortfall because there was also a lot of guidance from HUD last year about you better not end up back in shortfall because there won't be any, don't count on any money to bail you out. Don't count on that 700,000 that we got a couple of years ago. Don't count on it because you don't, don't plan on it because there probably won't be any money to bail you if you spend too much. And so there was actually a letter that came out to all the executive directors to that effect where You know, watch what you're spending, watch what you're doing, make sure you're staying, you know, within your means and you're living within your means. And so a lot of caution about raising payment standards too high, a lot of caution about, you know, just caution about, because there are a fair amount of housing authorities, I think, that were back in shortfall last year. So there was a lot of pressure to kind of be frugal. And when it was clear that we could match what the CDA was doing, because we like to keep our payment standards the same, because we have a lot of people who are porting back and forth between the city and the county. And it's easier for the participants. If we have the same payment standard, it's easier for the landlords because some of our special purpose vouchers, we're considering the county one market where people can lease up anywhere. So we bought, got, you know, we've got vouchers from both agencies in some developments and it's easier for our staffs too. When, when, people are moving back and forth if we're all using the same payment standards. So I think, you know, the fact that where we're at right now, I think we're at a healthy amount for people to find places. As we're pulling more people off the waiting list and looking at lease-up times, that can be informative too. on how how it's going with people being able to find places but it's been there was one year where payment standards actually went down a little bit and that really surprised us because we weren't expecting that we thought with the inflation and what's going on here in our county that it would have continued to rise and so that was a very big surprise that that we had a year where We didn't really have an increase in payment standard or an increase in fair market rents, I should say, because the payment standards have to be between 90% and 110% of fair market rents. But HUD's fair market rents went down a little bit for Dane County, and that was shocking. But I think we're at a good place right now, especially with the increase we just had for August 1st, too.

Great. Thank you. I appreciate that. Any other questions? I guess I have one last one. Where are you in your annual plan process and are you proposing, will you be proposing any updates or changes to your admissions policies or administrative plan?

Well, Yes, I still have to finish updating the annual plan, which has to happen really soon to be able to hopefully submit that to HUD by mid-October and still maintain a 45-day publication period by public hearing at the end. So we've got some hotma. regs that go into effect January 1st and we're switching on the voucher side from housing quality standards to INSPIRE. So that's one of the things we were working on today is some of our key HOTMA chapters. HOTMA is a reg that HUD adopted about 10 years ago and is finally implementing. And it affects kind of how we're calculating income and our recertifications and some things on verification. So so, yes, we have some chapters to revise and we're working on that. So, yeah, we're we're we're in the midst of all that.

Okay, I lied. I have one more question. Are you still working on hiring a deputy? The county board had approved funding for additional staffing to support you in all your various programs and increased capacity. So how's that going?

I'm working on the job description, and I have enlisted our... HR consulting firm to help me with that hiring process too. So I'm hoping to have a draft of that done in the next week as well. So there's a lot going on right now. Great. Thank you.

Any other questions for Karen? Seeing none. Thanks again for joining us and good luck. With all of that, we'll be keeping an eye out. Appreciate your work. These are really important programs that so many Dane County residents, but not nearly enough can benefit from.

Thank you for all the good questions and a good discussion. So I appreciate the engagement. So thank you.

You're welcome. All right, we will move on to our next presentation, which is 2026 Presentation 110 Badger Prairie Health Care Center Division Overview. And we have the Badger Prairie Administrator, Bill Brotsman, here with us. Great to see you in person. Thanks for coming.

Good evening.

A little closer. Good evening. How's that? Good. My name is Bill Brotzman. I'm a nurse and I've been a nursing home administrator for 36 years. The last 12 years at Badger Prairie Health Care Center, Wisconsin's foremost nursing home. Thank you for allowing me to present tonight. It's an honor to be here. Though the county has had some type of care facility in Verona for 150 years, the modern skilled nursing center was opened in 2011. We have 120 private rooms, which are Medicare and Medicaid certified. And we overlook the beautiful Badger Prairie Park in Verona. Though we do care for elderly residents, the reason Badger Prairie exists, our niche, is that we provide care to residents who can't be cared for in traditional nursing homes due to multi-complex diagnoses, pardon me, high care acuity, behavioral issues, and we also have a significant population diagnosed with mental illness. We care for residents who have many of the most challenging and debilitating illnesses known to mankind, Huntington's, Parkinson's, all of the dementias, including vascular, Lewy body, frontotemporal, alcohol, and drug-induced dementia, and of course, Alzheimer's. We care for residents who have traumatic brain injuries, heart attacks, strokes, schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, major depressive disorders, and we also care for bariatric residents who can weigh over 400 pounds. Next slide please, thank you. One of the many wonderful things about Badger Prairie is that most of our services are internal or self-contained. We provide the full range of occupational, physical, and speech therapies. We have a contracted psychiatric physician assistant who comes to the building to help care for our residents suffering from mental illness. We have a great relationship with UW Health, who provides us with rounding physicians weekly in the facility, laboratory services, and our amazing medical director, Dr. Alexis Eastman. We have a visiting dentist, podiatrist, optometrist. We even have our very own beautician. And just because one is aging or infirmed, our residents still care very much about their appearance and the way they look. Badger Prairie is very fortunate that our employees have the longest tenure in the state for nursing homes. And with that, we are one of the few facilities in the state that uses zero agency nurses and CNAs from outside staffing agencies, which are provided at an exorbitant cost. And the importance of having most of our services self-contained is that enables us to promote consistency and continuity of care for our residents. Plus all of us know what it's like trying to get to a doctor's appointment on the other side of town in the middle of January. If you can imagine what that's like for a 65 year old suffering from schizophrenia. While there is a cost associated with the services we provide, we also save the county money as we're able to take residents from the larger, more expensive institutions such as Winnebago and Mendota. And each year we're also able to stabilize a few residents and discharge them back into the community or lesser care environments, which also means less cost to the county. And the correlation between level of service or the acuity level of care provided and cost is proportionate in descending order. You have your hospitals, super institutions, nursing homes, assisted livings, group homes, community, et cetera. Slide, please. This next slide shows the amount of levy Badger Prairie has required over the past few years. Last year, it was a meager $235,000. There are a couple reasons for this noticeable trend. A few years ago, the state finally made some improvement in their reimbursement for our Medicaid residents after underpaying nursing homes for decades. Now, the payment structure still hasn't kept up with all of our costs to provide care, but it is definitely an improvement. Another reason is that county facilities receive what is called an IGT or intergovernmental transfer payment from the federal government. And essentially what this payment entails is that the feds recognize that county facilities typically care for a higher number of Medicaid residents compared to other private pay-centered facilities in the community, as well as taking care of the more challenging residents. Hence, the stipend is paid out to county facilities in our state, a set amount of money to a set number of facilities. Now unfortunately, you may have heard that several county facilities have closed their doors in past years. However, this means a bigger share of the pie for existing facilities, including ours. Nursing homes face intense scrutinization and are heavily regulated by governmental agencies. Licensure certification surveys, complaint investigations, and infection control inspections are all tools used by regulators to assure compliance within nursing homes. If you show me a facility that is closed, changed ownership, or made negative headlines in the state or nation, Almost always, I will show you a facility that experienced extensive or severe violations. It's a very serious business and sanctions can be quite severe for facilities that don't meet regulatory expectations. Unfortunately, facilities have lost their licenses and facilities have also received fines and penalties in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That topic will segue me to the next topic. I could stand up here all night long and brag about Badger Prairie Health Care Center, but I don't want you to take just my word for it. Slide, please, thank you. For the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, that's DHS, Department of Quality Assurance, DQA, these are the nursing home regulators Badger Prairie Healthcare Center achieved a deficiency-free annual licensure and certification in 2024. That's right, a perfect survey. For context, less than 3% of nursing homes nationwide achieved this feat. The following year, 2025, we received one low-level citation during our licensure certification survey. The national average is about eight. And the following information will come from the federal government CMS. As you know, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, they're the highest court in the land. And they're the ones responsible for creating and enforcing, in conjunction with the state DQA, the thousands of regulations through hundreds of pages in the long-term care operations manual. CMS gathers and analyzes all the data from nursing homes nationwide to come up with a STAR rating system. And what they use is a CASPER report. It's an acronym for Certification and Survey Provider Enhanced Reports. And this report is a data report used by healthcare facilities like nursing homes and skilled nursing facilities to track patient care quality, review submission validation, and compare facility performance against state and national averages. Slide, please. I've listed a few highlights from the recent CMS CASPER report in which quality of care is rated. In the category falls with major injury, Badger Prairie is equal to or better than 90.8% of SNFs nationwide. Remember that a SNF stands for skilled nursing facility. In the category long-term stay hospitalizations, Badger Prairie is equal to or better than 88% of SNFs nationwide. In the category of nursing staff turnover, Badger Prairie is equal to or better than 100% of SNFs nationwide. And in the category of total nurse staffing, Badger Prairie is equal to or better than 100% of nursing homes nationwide. I forgot to put quotation marks for the next two summary statements on the slide presentation. Quote, Badger Prairie Health Care Center's overall performance is equal to or better than 99.9% of nursing homes nationwide. End quote. Quote, Badger Prairie's overall performance is equal to or better than 100% of nursing homes in our state, end quote. So all of these metrics are entered into a national database to develop a five-star rating program. And I'm very proud to share with you that Badger Prairie Healthcare Center is rated at five out of five stars per CMS. It truly is an amazing accomplishment that we're very proud of. Next slide, please. Thank you. I would also like to share with you that Badger Prairie employees are on the front line of healthcare 24-7, 365. As positions are not remote, just as we were through the dreadful pandemic years of 2020, 21, and 22. We have the largest division in human services with 188 employees. well over 200 employees when you factor all of the county employees providing services to our building and residents, such as facilities maintenance, trades, and consolidated food service. We serve as a clinical nursing site in order to help train students from Madison College. And we also serve as a training site for UW social work interns. This is our way of helping the future healthcare workforce and giving back to Dane County. 51% of our employees are BIPOC. We served 138 residents in 2025. And lastly, in a resident satisfaction survey, 99% of residents and their guardians, pardon me, and their guardians reported that the care they receive at Badger Prairie is excellent or very good.

Slide, please. Thank you.

As you can see, Dane County has a lot to be proud of with Badger Prairie Health Care Center. Our nursing home division provides much needed and valuable care to the people of Dane County and completes the circle of services provided by DHS. I love showing off our facility, so if you would ever like to stop by for a tour, feel free to do so. Thank you for your time tonight and for letting me present on this magnificent facility. If you have any questions, feel free to let me know.

Thank you so much. That's a lot to be proud of. And are there any questions from the committee?

No questions. No questions, but thank you for all that you do.

A couple of years ago or for some period of time, I know there was a lot of challenges related to scheduling and some staffing stuff. And you have a lot of those have had a lot of those kind of point to, you know, small sort of challenges. POSITIONS AND NURSING ASSISTANTS AND STUFF. CAN YOU SPEAK A LITTLE BIT TO HOW STAFFING IS GOING AND SCHEDULING SOME OF THAT WORK THAT'S HAPPENED OVER THE YEARS?

YES. THANK YOU. WELL, FIRST OF ALL, THANKS TO YOU CHAIR WEGLEITNER BY APPROVING OUR EXTRA FTE POSITIONS TO COVER SHORTFALLS THAT WERE FURTHER CREATED BY THE DREADFUL PANDEMIC. Remember, everyone had mandatory vaccinations by the federal government, unprecedented time in healthcare, and finally Badger Prairie felt it. So I want to thank you years later because your act enabled us to continue. Now then, to current day, our staffing has gotten better. Listen, we are very fortunate. We have it so much better as the metrics from CMS showed than some of your smaller mom and pop facilities in rural areas. We still experience a turnover on kind of the periphery of our staffing, but the heart of our nurses and CNAs remains very strong. Hence, we have the longest tenured nursing home staff in the state and pretty much the nation. So everything again was exacerbated by the fear and the panic of the pandemic being on the front line. staff members. I'm not going to get a vaccination. They took early retirement. They quit. They got into different lines of work. It was a time of trepidation and fear. And I'm so pleased to be done with those three years. So again, you helped lay the foundation for healing that and it's continued on. We still experience, because we're 24-7, we'll get beat up pretty bad on a weekend where we have call-ins. But our staffing, the core of it, is much better than it was when I had to bring an agency, unfortunately, the summer a few years ago. So we're past those times. We're not perfect, but again, our core staff... is pretty solid. And we're always trying to battle Collins and, you know, people who can't come to work. That's always a challenge in a 24 seven. But certainly we're in a much better seat than we were a few years ago, which you referenced.

Thank you. Any other questions? All right. Well, thanks for sticking it out through some presentations and now move on to

Thank you.

Dr. Stacker, who's been very, very patiently still on Zoom with us. I apologize that we have such an inquisitive and thoughtful committee, but sometimes that means a lot of questions and items take a little longer than maybe we anticipated. So thanks for being here, Dr. Stacker, and we look forward to your presentation on the Children, Youth, and Families Division.

Well, thank you. I actually left it. I averted an emergency, so I'm glad I was able to come back. My goodness. Well, that's what we do in CYF, isn't it? Well, thank you, everybody. And good evening. I'm really excited to have the opportunity to present on behalf of the Children, Youth and Families Division. And actually, before I start, I really want to thank our Children, Youth and Families Division staff just for the amazing work that they do in the community. There's 168 staff. As Bill stated, he has a large division and we're the second largest division in human services and our youth justice and prevention staff and child protective services. Well, it's referenced often as child welfare and child well-being. They just do amazing work, working with the community, the clients that we serve and also supporting each other in very difficult work. And also with us having, you know, hiring freezes and things like that, having to do more I just really appreciate that. I have a lot of respect for them right now. I always have, but even more so. And so I just really want to acknowledge that up front and ensuring that our key programs keep fidelity. So I just wanted to say that off the top. And so that just kind of leads into our philosophy out of the gate, just promoting well-being and culture of not just only supporting the community, but each other. in an environment of mutual respect, professionalism, autonomy, and to feel valued. And that's key of why I said what I said, because I want them to always know that they're valued, and particularly by me. And then the program mission, of course, is the health and safety of children and youth and families is paramount in the work that we do, and it's on the front end, preventative and intervention, and it always should be. And just increasing family sustainability. It's not just putting a bandaid on things, but how do you make people sustainable over the long run? Because the reality is that they shouldn't be relying on systems. Although they may need help, they shouldn't always be relying on systems. So how do you help people be sustainable beyond the scope of human services or beyond the scope of child protective services, youth justice prevention, and many other things that I've heard tonight? housing and things like that, there always becomes this, uh, you know, when you make more, you lose more mentality and mantra that shouldn't happen. So how do you keep stability as well? And then finally, the ability to provide things, you know, how do you do things out of the box and offer opportunities that may not have existed, but always should have for people to have opportunities to explore new opportunities, jobs, trainings, whatever the case may be, mental health services, that those things are made available meeting a person where they're at. So those are some of the things that are the philosophies and things that we work under the guise of and also never minimizing disparities. Next slide, please. So under my particular title, there's a link and under that link, you'll see multiple Referrals and of community organizations that are instant links and resources, as well as national organizations for multiple services programs throughout the community, national organizations. help lines, things of that nature. And if it's not enough, you'll see more that you can find. So I will recommend to share that link widely. If someone is asking or needing resources, it is a wealth of resources under that particular link. One of the things that I think is important is because of the work that we do, and I'll give a quick overview in just a minute, is that because of the work that we do, I was very honored this year to attend a first ever for Children, Youth and Families Division National Conference. It was called the 2026 Wicked Problem Institute Conference. We were invited by Children's Hospital of Wisconsin because of the work that we've done that has hit benchmarks at a national level of reduction of youth and families in the system in Dane County and some of the things that we've implemented. And I can tell you, it was just phenomenal. And we need to count on a lot of those resources that you see in that link and partnership and referrals and programs and services. So please ensure that you pass those along if people are asking in the community. And it was an honor to attend that conference. The first time ever for human services to be invited to something of that magnitude. And it was, I'll tell you, it was daunting to be in the room with some of the people that I was in the room with. It was quite the honor. Moving on to youth justice and prevention. The managers overseas youth justice and prevention is Andre Johnson. And you see his email there if you ever want to specifically reach out to him. Youth Justice this year hit some amazing benchmarks. In January, we had zero youth in corrections. That is historical. We couldn't remember the last time that that happened. Also this year, we were fortunate. We've looked at our data and this has taken work. We had an 11% reduction of youth of color. That hasn't happened since 2012 of youth being in the youth justice system. We also have a historical low of youth in the criminal justice system in Dane County. And this is something to be very proud of, of the work that our staff are doing. There's always more to do and the type of work that we do in this ebb and flow. But I really want to note that it's some substantial work that Youth Justice is doing. And it is showing because of preventative work and keeping our youth out of the system, which is what we should be doing. I always say put me out of my job. I'm still in my job. So there's still work to do. So some of the things that we do specifically is our early intervention services unit. That's working with early intervention, identification of prevention, supportive intervention and targeting youth. So like gang intervention. and showing signs and systems for involvement, behavioral support services. That works a lot with the kids that come into the Youth Justice and Prevention Building. We changed our name to Youth Justice and Prevention intentionally. The kids redesigned our building. They love to come into that building. Our court diversion unit is now bifurcated right now because we don't have a supervisor in that position and it doesn't look like we'll be able to refill that position But they and our intake unit. So there's six assess youth referrals from law enforcement to courts and conducting intakes with an assessment that is statewide called the YASI. That's a youth assessment and screening instrument. It's research and validated for risk needs and strengths. And it's an assessment tool that's utilizing youth and juvenile justice for youth services. It evaluates at risk youth. during the intake and case management processes. It's a very effective tool and it's been used for some years. It is a mandated tool statewide. We also have municipal court diversion and restorative circles. There's a video at the end that you'll all be able to see about our restorative circles and working very effectively with the YWCA and a partnership that they did in MOUs across the county has been excellent. And And Briarpatch working with that particular contract is an excellent contract. And then, of course, our restorative justice programs. I'm sorry, it's a video for the restorative justice programs. And that's working with community accountability, victims, offenders, repairing harm, and trying to reduce formal juvenile criminal offenses. And then finally, we have our YGP ongoing case management and supervision units. And that's for community supervision, programming, skill building, employment readiness, personal development, and working with youth that have formal court orders. So a broad variety of things that we do within youth justice and prevention that people don't often know about and a lot of contracting activities. and programming of services and also what we do in our infrastructure. If anybody has any questions or comments, please feel free to stop me at any time. If not, I'll continue to move on to Child Protective Services. Or as the mantra has changed a little bit of child welfare or child well-being as looking at it in that sense, because it's not all child protective services. It's a holistic approach to family finding and the families. And so it starts with access and screening. And that's a 24-7. We do not close. Um, and, um, operating with child abuse and neglect reports line and screening incoming reports to evaluate child safety and immediate risk. Um, that is mandatory. Everything I'm talking to you about is mandatory except for voluntary services. Um, there's also, um, emergency protective services is after hours responses, staff sign up to do that voluntary voluntarily supervisors are mandated. Um, And we also have mandatory reporting as part of that, that also gained national attention and how we shifted our mandatory reporting that has become a national model. And so that has really been actually the Department of Children and Families mimicked our model. Very, very proud of that. That was also one of the reasons we were invited to the national conference. Initial assessment. If there is an abuse that is screened and initial assessment conducts form of field assessments and investigations regarding allegations of abuse and neglect to determine child safety and immediate family service needs. So and that is time sensitive and mandated to make a determination in 60 days of that. And then there could be CPS ongoing services as a direct result of that assessment. And that provides mandatory and voluntary long-term case management, safety planning, family stabilization services to keep children safe in their homes or to work towards reunification. And so you'll see like staff, like our safety service specialists for child needs to be reunified. And the goal is to reunify in a very timely manner. That's time sensitive and mandated as well. Um, family first and like Ken, um, has become a significant part of that as well. And if a child is placed out of home that they would be placed with a family member first, that is a priority. Um, and that is a statewide priority. And we really do really play that forward. Pardon me. We really play that forward and, uh, work that we do as well. Um, Also in our out of home care data per capita, we have one of the out of home care reductions in the state of Wisconsin currently in Dane County. So that has taken some years to do as well. These things take time. And so that has taken some time. Finally, in this area, I'd like to mention our family and community engagement or our FACE unit. This has been created now for a few years. And the focus is on prevention and working with chronic neglect specifically. So these are families that are not in the system and the goal is to keep them out of the system. It is specifically working with preventative services, meeting them where they're at. So it's family preservation and connecting families directly with community-based support systems. And that could be a variety of things before formal intervention becomes necessary. This has proven to be extremely successful and it was also something that was brought to national attention And we just got some data that was gathered for this, which I'll model this at the budget meeting. I want to save that as a surprise. And so that'll be modeled at the budget meeting as something I'll highlight. Finally, I'd like to mention our staff manager. Oh, I'm sorry. And under child welfare, we have two child protective service managers, Julie Annan, who I'm going to miss greatly, is going to retire at the end of this year. Really going to miss her a great deal. And then Brenda Blank, our ongoing social, and you can see on the links, I'm sorry, the specific areas they oversee. So Julie oversees access initial assessment and FACE. And then Brenda oversees ongoing the social service specialist targeted safety support funds. That specifically works with when children come back into the home to provide intensive services or whatever the family needs to ensure that reunification is successful. It's a highly successful model where you hire people with lived, I say living experiences to work with the families. And so we have a unit that specifically is people with living experiences that work with the families. They also are provided counseling and therapy and services at the state level and support groups as well that work with the families. It's an excellent model. And so we have a unit that's specific for that. And Brenda oversees that. And then finally, as I stated, staff development. We have a manager, Nancy Ortigan Johnson, that oversees that of the 168 staff. She specifically works with recruitment and hiring coordination. So she oversees recruitment pipelines, interviews and candidate selection and partnership with employee relations and human resources for all of the staff. And staffing needs. She also oversees training and insurance CEUs and the training needs, guest speakers, records requests for open cases in the DA's office, specifically go to her area. She also oversees in her area, a supervisor that specifically oversees the fleet. And particularly because the Children, Youth and Families Division utilizes the majority of the fleet in human services regularly. So the fleet location, I'm sorry, location, policy practices, working in accordance with DOA and Corp Council. That oversight is pretty significant in that area as well. And then workforce retention and onboarding falls under her particular area. I'm just making sure I didn't miss anything here. I think I covered everything. I tried to be fast but furious here. So I think these are some of the big things. And of course, we have several intensive contracts. The majority of our contracts actually are on youth justice and prevention. But we have services throughout, of course. And then we try to use RAP funds effectively and make decisions. I'm thinking out of the box always with partnerships. I think that's about it. And we do have a video that I would love for you all to see on the next slide. It's our restorative justice summer training program. It's a series, but this was the larger video and then the other ones are smaller ones.

Hold on. How do I get the volume to work? This is a little.

Sorry.

I don't think there is any such thing as a bad kid. We're preventing young people being involved in the justice system.

Really restorative justice is about relationships. We live in a system where a lot of times punishment is used to support things like conflict. When we kick scholars and students out of our building, if we're suspending or expelling or sending folks home, it really breaks the relationships that they have, not only the relationship with the school, but the relationship with the people, their teachers, their friends and peers and classmates.

So we are trying to make a case for prevention and proactive work to keep kids out of the system and show the successes that they can have. When kids get in trouble, that's when they are provided services, and it just usually increases their level of system involvement, and we see a big difference in Dane County.

Sort of justice really seeks to bring people back together, build that community, use those values that we have, and try to repair a relationship rather than kind of isolating or outcasting somebody for causing harm.

A lot of our young people will listen to their peers before they'll listen to adults. And what we found was that when young people are at the high school level, their habits and patterns are really established already. So we refocused, started in middle school. We become part of their kind of core memory at that age because brain development just starts taking off after that.

The breakthroughs often happen when scholars and students feel like they're hurt. I'm over here wiping tears and we're passing this box of Kleenex around. And it's this really emotional moment on being able to be in a place where you're willing to like hear somebody else's perspective and experiences, I think is something that our society is deeply in need of.

at their sort of justice camp, it kind of like teaches kids about like life, things you're going to have to deal with in the real world. I want to be part of the group of leaders. I want to be around people who understand what's right from wrong and not just what I think and also standing up for people who need it.

Community doesn't just stop when the game ends or the activity ends. It continues in the conversations when

step out of this space that's continuing to build those connections and those relationships that are really crucial to fostering these deeper conversations one bad decision can cost you like entire lifetime like once you do one bad thing or if you hang around the wrong crowd and like if they can't trouble your guilty by association I want to be one of those people that they're able to look up to, like you see on a poster board. I want to be him when I grow up.

In the summer, we'll work for two days with different middle school and high school groups. We talk a lot about values in circle, the language that you speak, the place that you're born, or the race or ethnicity that makes you who you are. The breaks that we give, the activities that we're choosing are all really intentional.

So we are one stable aspect of their lives when other things might be very unstable. This is the only program in the state like this. So we often have young people stop by our building years later and knock on the door and say, is Mr. So-and-so here? But then they say, I just want you to know that. Sometimes I know when you worked with me, I was a knucklehead, but I was listening to everything you said. And I'm here today because of that.

Well, they inspire me and that's why I do what I do. And I hope that was a bit of inspiration for you all to end your evening. And with that, I'll leave it if you all, if anybody has any questions or comments.

Thank you, Dr. Sacker. That was indeed very moving and inspirational. Do committee members have any questions? um you started your presentation recognizing um the good and important work of the staff in your division i'm wondering if if you can speak a bit to you know staffing levels and how the hiring freeze has impacted your division i you know obviously it's a really critical um services and having to respond. And I think at least some positions may have been exempt from the hiring freeze, but I'm just wondering how that's gone from your perspective.

Well, no positions were exempt from the hiring freeze. I want to be clear about that. When it started out, all positions were frozen. And so we are up to 20 vacancies in However, we've recently had five approved. Um, and then, um, we do have a budget proposal coming up and we currently have nine, um, positions that we have requested to be filled. Um, so of the 14 positions, so of the 20 total, one would not be a mandated position. And then of the 14, we're requesting to be filled, which, so there would be nine left to be filled five. We have, um, had approved, and I do want to thank John, Director Schluter, for moving those forward and his advocacy in the background. I do appreciate that. I do want to acknowledge that. We do still have nine vacancies of mandated positions that we do need to fill. And I, you know, the staff are doing more work and it sometimes it is a morale thing. And I do try my best to work with that with them because we already work in a high volume, high stressful job. But they really have been doing, you know, working as a team. And so that's the answer that I have in regards to the positions. And also understanding that, you know, this is a hiring freeze across Stain County and that, You know, there has to be other departments that are considered, but also at the same time that these are mandated services in regards to children, youth, and families. And, you know, we don't have the option not to do that. But there are other emergency areas as well. But we can only have so many vacancies.

That's right. Thank you for providing that and correcting me.

Sure.

Any other questions from the committee? okay seeing none um we will move on then to director's report on 2027 budget preparation um i know it's the release is imminent director shooter so um we look forward to to seeing that when it's out but um you have any updates you want to provide in terms of new information that has not yet been provided to this committee um knowing that we've received several of these that have talked about the themes in the past but any updates of on issues or points that the committee's not yet heard from you on yeah coming through okay yep okay good

Yeah, quickly, the last couple of weeks have been really a mad dash. On our end, it's been a rapidly changing environment, so I want to recognize the efforts of the division administrators and all of the people that report to them on their teams who have been in it deep with budget action items. also goes without saying the fiscal team um and they everybody wants these of them right now so just special thanks to all of them um i also want to um i also um want to say that there were a number of unanticipated projects that were elevated in the last projects, facility building consolidation items that were elevated in the last few weeks, that put a lot of strain on the system. So I just want to recognize again, division leadership across human services, because they were highly flexible. And I want to recognize and appreciate that publicly. In the next 24 hours, as you signaled, Chair Weigleitner, the budget message will be issued to all DHS staff. Another message will be sent out to providers, and then another message to the executive with the proposed budget will be scheduled to be posted tomorrow. Providers, one of the things that we try to do always is The providers that have proposed reductions and contracts, they're notified in advance of the budget release as a courtesy. So that was done over the last yesterday and today. So over the last couple of days, providers with promotions were notified. And again, that's a courtesy, so they don't find out or have it in the contract. They know in advance.

You may have frozen, Director Schluter. Are you there? Now you're off video. Maybe that helps. Can you hear me? All right. We see you again. You're on mute, though. You kind of froze on us, and you're muted.

Sorry.

It's okay.

Okay. But... The other items that I have to cover are really repeats. They're going to be highlighted in the budget message to staff and to the provider service agencies. The budget document is significant, as always, and I just want to end by saying thank you to All of you, thank you to HHN for support. I recognize that we're going into a hard time and not everybody's going to agree with the proposed decisions that we made. I understand that. And, you know, tough calls to be made and a year of a deficit. But I appreciate all of the hard work and thoughtfulness that our teams put into this and recognize that this is only one part of the process. So in advance, thank you.

That's right. There's more work to come. Director Suter, I am going to request that the committee be copied on the communications that are sent out or or at least forwarded the communications i think it would be helpful for us to um see that uh you mentioned three different ones the staff the providers and the county executive is that something you can do um i am i'm the

to the providers and the staff. Amanda, if you couldn't do that for the gift, you can forward those once they're publicly released. I'd appreciate that assist with the exact I'd want to check with their office just to make sure that's okay.

Okay, and but they will be published on the department's website tomorrow.

the but the budget yes um we i believe it's scheduled to post at noon okay thank you

Any questions for Director Schluter? We'll have plenty of questions, I think, at our next opportunity where I've asked for an overview of the department's request, as well as we'll get that on Human Services Budget Night as part of the listening sessions and public hearings on the 2027 budget. So if you don't mind, that would be maybe the best time to ask questions. And then I think that brings us to future meeting items and dates. Our next one is in two weeks, September 3rd. And then please note these upcoming meetings are going to be really important that we you're going to want to be here. This is the most critical time as we enter budget season. So and if you're not if you do have a problem please notify myself and Amanda. There's no public comment on items on the agenda any such other businesses allowed by law. Not is there a motion to adjourn so by supervisor busy any objection to adjournment see no objection we are adjourned.